Top 5 Reasons to Go Meat-Free on Mondays in 2012

A resolution for the times

This is one resolution you can enjoy long after New Year's Eve is forgotten. iStockphoto

Meat-free eating went mainstream in 2011. Whether it was
former President Bill Clinton announcing his plant-based diet or Ellen DeGeneres launching an
online clearinghouse of
vegetarian resources, veggie eating has never been more popular.

Part of this status is owed to the Meatless Mondays movement, which encourages
people to eat meat-free one day a week.

Here are the top five reasons to include Meatless
Mondays in your 2012 resolutions.

Five: It's a diet that sticks

So many New Year's resolution diets
fall by the wayside come February. Lots of people eat healthy for a few weeks
following the holiday overload, but then quickly resume their normal eating
habits. Because eating meat-free one day a week is such an easy thing
to do, it's one New Year's diet that you can continue all year long.

Four: Green is good

Raising, transporting, slaughtering,
and processing farm animals (and growing all the feed they need) requires a lot
more natural resources than creating plant-based foods. According to the Sierra Club, if Americans
reduced our meat consumption by just 20 percent, it'd have the same
environmental benefit as everyone switching from a standard sedan to a
hybrid vehicle.

Three: Your taste buds will thank you

Resolving to eat meat-free one day each week will introduce your
taste buds to new foods. From tasty
plant-based products like veggie dogs and black bean burgers to ethnic
foods like Thai tofu curry and the wide variety of meat-free dishes offered at
Indian, Ethiopian, and Japanese restaurants, you'll discover a
whole new world of delicious food out there just waiting to be enjoyed.

Two: Your body will thank you

Meat is often heavy in cholesterol and saturated fats,
whereas vegetarian foods tend not to be. Compare the protein content on a
package of veggie dogs and a package of hot dogs, and you’ll see that
plant-based products usually have the same—or even more—protein than their
animal-based counterparts. You can get all the good stuff, without as much of the bad
stuff. That makes it easier to drop some inches from your waistline and reduce
your risk of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and other serious health
problems.

One: Animals will thank you

More than one million animals are
slaughtered each hour in the United States, and concern over how the vast majority of
them are mistreated on factory farms has reached new heights. From chickens and pigs
being crammed into tiny cages to animals being pumped full of antibiotics and
hormones to make them grow unnaturally quickly, there's widespread animal
cruelty in industrial agribusiness.

If each American abstained from meat just
on Mondays, roughly 1.4 billion animals could be spared factory farming
each year. That's a lot less suffering.